F. Tennyson Jesse

F[riniwyd] Tennyson Jesse (1888-1958) was fascinated by the psychology of murder, as well as its sordid nuts and bolts. 'My chief passion', she once remarked. Her chef-d'œuvre in the field is A Pin To See The Peep-Show (1934), a long novel, compellingly written, based closely on the 1922 Thompson-Bywaters case. In general her approach was no-nonsense and realistic - she edited a number of the Hodge Notable British Trials series, including those volumes devoted to Mrs Alma Victoria Rattenbury and George Percy Stoner, Madeleine Smith, and the egregious John Reginald Halliday Christie. She also possessed an interesting streak of feyness, as evidenced by a series of stories featuring a female psychic detective, Solange Fontaine, written mainly after the Great War for the Premier Magazine, London Magazine, and Strand Magazine, and collected in The Solange Stories (1931) and the posthumous The Adventures of Solange Fontaine (1995).
>[From Biographical Note by Jack Adrian, in Oxford Twelve Tales of Murder]